Dead Arc
Jason Thallus is a mercenary assassin operating out of Gotham City, born in 1987, February 14th. Origin Since his childhood, Jason Thallus was a gifted athlete and scientist, interested in various technological fields such as computer science, applied physics, and materials science. He was told to follow his dreams by his Mother and Father, and led a seemingly gifted childhood. At the age of 15, in 2002, Jason's father, Arthur, a Captain in the US Marine Corps, was killed in action somewhere in Qurac, during a tour of duty with a squad of marines in response to various terrorist acts. This development had a profound effect on Jason's mind; while he was always somewhat brooding, and arrogant, the death of his Father drove him to reach new heights, and demand blood for blood. He joined the USMC the next year, lying about his age, which worked due to his deep voice and large physical stature, and befriending the man that performed a background check on him to keep his birth record a secret. Dead Arc, or Jason Thallus, was one of the US marines' top special operations commandos at the age of 17. He excelled at heavy weapons usage, gymnastics and martial arts, fencing, stealth operations, computer science and applied physics - he was a regular Batman in the making, of a certain variety. Incredibly loyal and possessing a certain loose morality and bloodlust, Deathstroke spotted this young recruit one day when he killed seventeen enemy combatants using his training and martial superiority, getting shot in his left lung at the same time. He was captured by Deathstroke, trained in secret with USMC support to turn Jason Thallus into one of the worlds' top assassins and soldiers - Dead Arc, so named for the geometry of artillery fire before it lands on opponents. Arc was one of Deathstrokes' favorite students, and at the age of 20 he was enhanced in the same was Slade was enhanced lo those many years ago - the US military thought they could get a controllable super soldier. They were wrong. Rise to power Enhanced, trained by the best in the Marine Corps and now one of the best assassins on the planet, Dead Arc was ready to begin his own career as a gun for hire, for the Government, or for businesses and organizations he found interesting enough to work for. His primary personal goal was once to fight - and eliminate - the Batman family, as he sees them as some of his greatest challenges, and some of the only challenge he could conceive of that hadn't been gifted with the unfair advantage of a superpower. He considers metahumans an annoyance but necessity, as they don't need to work hard or practice to be powerful, they are simply given power as a gift, something he thinks is an injustice to a certain extent. When he turned 22 and left the military, he started a small company called Ghost Systems, a technology company located in Gotham that has served to equip and house Dead Arc and his deadly habits of hunting and killing people that have bounties on them. It specializes in advanced materials science, but has departments and ongoing research for other areas of science as well such as weapons development, medicine, and energy reactors. The company, combined with his deadly assassination career, has made him a multi-millionaire. In July 2010, when Jason was 23, he worked for a small agency called Redstone Security Agency after having finished the initial training with Deathstroke, and was deployed to Qurac once more, this time on a mission to kill an insurgent leader who had massacred the US Embassy's personnel. Jason - by this time known as Dead Arc - was the spotter for a sniper codenamed "Grim". Along with Commander Grim, the two successfully killed the insurgent leader, and well over a dozen insurgents, before having to be extracted a few blocks away from their initial position. Several civilians were also lost in the conflict. 2012 In early 2012 Arc was very active. Having assassinated rival crime bosses in Gotham, and supplied his allies with stolen or researched weaponry, he was gaining reputation fast, and as a result he started a clandestine group of mercenaries under his banner - Arc Corps. His first member was a ninja from the Shadow Shinobi clan of ninja in Japan, whom he used to ally his group with the clan in Japan, for access to more manpower should the need arise. Not long after Arc Corps's start, Dead Arc was employed by Lex Luthor, thanks to Deathstroke's help, to capture Supergirl - meanwhile working for a private client to capture Batgirl at the same time, to extract information on where the Bat-family gets their technology and resources from. Thanks to an experimental suit Luthor allowed Arc to use in the operation, in one stroke Arc captured both of the superheroines, and Arc gained access to kryptonite to torture Supergirl for Luthor - but due to a Justice League breakout, a Lexcorp funded building in Gotham was demolished - Arc decided to destroy the building in an attempt to kill them all, rather than let them escape. In the end, he was crippled for several weeks while his body regenerated, from rubble falling on him. The suit was destroyed, and Arc's long-standing contract with Luthor was terminated. Arc was, later in 2012, fighting a doomsday-like monster in Metropolis, where he was knocked unconscious and nearly killed - but a Justice League member saved him with an unfinished and dangerous serum, that caused him to be brought to Luthor's labs to be cured, due to Luthor seeing him as a valuable asset. Deathstroke appeared to try to help the 26 year old Arc, which, with Luthor's scientists' efforts, caused Arc to be enhanced even further than Slade. Arc had now surpassed his mentor physically. Arc was faster, stronger, and tougher, but not as skilled, experienced, and therefore without quite the keen tactical mind of Deathstroke - he simply hadn't seen enough combat to understand all the angles of warfare. During a Justice Lords invasion of the world, Arc was situated in Metropolis, in the Tamaranean Embassy, where he had one of his Arc Corps associates strangled by his new left-hand assassin, Syllabea, for stalling in his task to get Nth metal for Arc to research and turn into the ultimate armor. Arc participated in the war in Metropolis for a short time, under the guise of Red Arc, with a differently colored uniform, a re-painted suit he wore to disguise his true identity. Arc gained access to the JLA's band of communication and data networks, from joining with his false alias Red Arc. Essentially, he has access to all the files and communications of the JLA that aren't especially heavily encrypted or protected, and access to their communications channels. Thus far no JLA members know that Red Arc is Dead Arc's false identity, and he has not been noticed. 2013 Absent for a year following events in Metropolis, Arc went relatively unnoticed for a time, and went to Japan for a year to improve relations with the ninja clan that his mercenary company was allied with. Slowly though, his company parted ways, and he was left alone again, the lone mercenary with boredom and equipment at his disposal... Until he met Supergirl again. Arc begins to harbor a grudge against Wayne Tech for trying to absorb his company when he wanted to try to corner the market with his inventions, and immediately after, a patent mistake caused him to lose propriety of an invented material he made, called "Thallunite", an alloy twice as strong as steel, slightly lighter in weight, only very mildly flexible, and non-conductive. The alloy is a special mixture of iron, aluminum, and boron carbide, a strong, lightweight ceramic. For this he hates Wayne Tech and deals with them only when he thinks it will benefit him greatly - he has no interest in helping Wayne Tech or fostering any sort of business relations with them. Due to this grudge, he shot Bruce Wayne in the arm in his costume of Dead Arc, intending to simply cause the man pain and anguish. On the rooftop of Gotham's Mercy General Hospital, Arc was making a threat to Gotham: either Batman or someone equally worthy of Arc's time comes to him and fights him simply for the glory of the fight, or Dead Arc would detonate one building in Gotham every day and night. Supergirl was flying nearby however - and when Dead Arc pulled out his old shard of kryptonite, Supergirl attempted to destroy the shard with heat vision, but Arc moved his hand at a very poor time, causing the heat vision to cleanly cut his left hand off, instead. Screaming in agony and anger, Arc disappeared, using a teleportation function on his suit to hastily retreat from the enraged Kryptonian, his kryptonite lost in the conflict. Due to this, Arc has pledged to get revenge on Supergirl, while he had his corporation Ghost Systems develop a robotic depleted-promethium prosthetic hand to use. Arc captured Supergirl due to a fluke chance of her being incapacitated by another villainess, inadvertently breaking a deal he had with a vampire he'd met named Alistair O'Shaunessey who wanted to suck Supergirl's blood, and began psychological torture when she was secured in a red-sunlight cell, by having his trusted employee Thom tell her she was incapacitated because she became violent and slaughtered police officers. Due to two of Arc's new assassin companions however, and an unnamed woman (Silvia Mirage) whom wanted to free Supergirl, a small portion of his company's compound was destroyed, and Supergirl escaped with a former associate codenamed Agent Zero. Agent Zero was shot in the eye by Silvia Mirage by accident when he burst into the room. Arc, having gone into a fury, nearly killed everyone (Supergirl, Agent Zero, Silvia, his ninja), but due to the shock of what had happened to Arc Corps, Ghost Systems and his plans for revenge, allowed them to escape with severe injuries instead, saying that they were not worth the trouble anymore. He then immediately executed all of his ninja for failing him and being what he considered worthless. He assassinated the mayor of Metropolis, a lackey of Luthor's, on contract from Lex Luthor. The mayor was going to spill top secret information on Luthor's operations, and Luthor wanted him killed; Arc was hired for $200,000 to assassinate the Mayor. The contract was completed, and Arc was captured, transferred to Belle Reve, but broken out four days later by the vampire Alistair O'Shaunessey, having agreed to let Arc work with him to destroy Supergirl and everything she holds dear, in exchange for not sucking Arc's blood due to Alistair's anger at the former deal they had. After several weeks of taking it easy, Arc has since hired a man known simply as Bad Ohmen to assassinate or capture Agent Zero in retribution, and capture and "break" the other agent, known as Alex or Kerdanaum, and if tempted, deliver Alex's daughter Kate to Arc so that he can send her and her father to Bane as a sort of message. Arc has said he intends to put out a global alert and bounty of half a million on the heads of both agents, and a million for the capture of Alex's daughter Kate so he can send her to Bane, thus destroying the family line of his former agent in retribution for his bumbling failure. Reformation Jason lured 17 mercenaries, most of which were amateurs hoping to make it big, to a courthouse in Gotham, where the trial of Alex Robinson, Jason's former agent, was taking place, while Jason was disguised under a fedora and trenchcoat, and took his mask off. Alex's daughter Kate was in the same area along with Silvia Mirage, who was disguised as an orphanage attendent. Kate was left with an orphanage, for reasons unknown, but was attending the trial of her Father that day. When a mercenary fired a shot to kill Alex, Jason fired a shot - and blocked the bullet that would have killed Alex, out of the air, with his own bullet. Jason then put his mask on and took off his fedora, walking to the center of the courtroom, asking for a show of hands who was there to kill Alex Robinson, and threatened that if no one answered, he'd start killing people, starting with the mercenary who tried to shoot Alex. When Jason saw how many people had come to kill Alex Robinson, he said, "that's it?" before proceeding to burn down, and kill, the entire courthouse and everyone in it - save for Kate, Silvia, and Jason. Jason was about to take Kate with him, as there was no viable way for Silvia to stop him after the onslaught that barely fazed Jason but nearly left Kate and Silvia immobile from accidental wounds, when Silvia pleaded with Jason not to take Kate - she was just a child, and he had already tested her sanity enough by killing her Father in front of her, and subjecting her to this mental torture. Jason originally was not affected by this plea, but upon remembering his own tortured origins, of how he felt when the news of his Father's death arrived, he opted to help Silvia and Kate escape, and helped get them to a hospital to treat both their wounds. Jason left afterwards, with the total death toll of his actions numbering well into the hundreds, due to the flames collapsing the majority of the courthouse. Legacy Following the courthouse incident, Jason was conflicted - he did not wish to harm people and cause such wanton destruction again, but he felt as if he had very little left of a future without mercenary work. In the middle of his self-debate, a man known as "Legacy" arrived on a nearby street just outside the courthouse that had collapsed, and began shooting civilians with a shoulder-mounted railgun. When Jason arrived on the scene, the crowd had mostly dispersed, and Legacy called Jason a "false king" and a "usurper", possibly eluding to Jason's self-proclaimed goal of becoming the greatest and most well-known assassin alive. The man (Legacy) was unskilled, and seemingly blind with rage, as he pulled out an axe and bullrushed Jason, swinging the axe wildly and furiously. Even after the mentally and physically demanding challenges of the night before, Jason was able to easily sidestep the assault, and Legacy got his axe "stuck" in a car fender. Jason walked over to the man slowly, savoring the ease with which his opponent had failed, as Legacy tried to get his axe out of the car, and Jason slide his katana through the back of Legacy. Eric, also known as Arc's former brother in arms and best friend Grim Phalanx, had been in the car that was smashed by the axe, and was holding a powerful magnet - holding the axe in place while Jason delivered the blow to Legacy. Eric stepped out of the car to reveal this to Jason, causing the two to laugh at the almost comedic circumstances of the battle, as Jason confided in Eric about his doubts and regrets. Eric consoled Jason, convincing him that he simply needed to set and stick to a set of rules as he had before, and stick to his honor no matter what. Jason agreed and decided to stay one-handed, without a prosthesis, and make his mark known, as the one-handed assassin. Shortly after their encounter ended, Eric emailed Jason a set of coordinates in Gotham City, the location of a small cache of technology that Eric was no longer using; a gift to boost Jason's spirits and entice him to improve upon the now aging technology, the former powered suits that Eric had been using, before he himself upgraded his armor. Equipment/Powers Powers/Traits - Enhanced strength (can lift approx. 1-2 tons at most when not wearing enhancing equipment, compared to Deathstroke's "strength of ten men" likely equalling slightly less than a ton) - 6' 6" tall, 243 pounds, 8% body fat. This is due to genetics, enhancements, and heavy training. - Enhanced durability (can jump off a ten story building and land without breaking any bones, can be shot in the head with armor covering head and not suffer damage by most firearms, without armor bullets still pierce skin like regular humans) - Enhanced reflexes (far faster and more accurate than the finest olympic athlete, can dodge bullets if he knows or can guess where they are coming from ahead of time) - Enhanced speed (can run 35 MPH) - Regeneration (cannot regenerate limbs, can regenerate most soft tissue or muscle damage much faster than a fit human, accelerated healing overall, resistant to poisons and radiation and other effects including the effects of volatile promethium) - Enhanced stamina (due to his healing factor, only severe duress or prolonged periods without rest causes him to fatigue) - Enhanced senses (can hear even sneaking humans, or bugs within several meters, can see precisely for 500 feet, keener sense of smell and feel) Equipment - Heated sabot flachette rounds for his weapons, capable of tripling the penetration power of any weapon they are fired out of. - Standard red/black suit, made with a weave of volatile promethium and kevlar, which adds great amounts to his durability and allows him to absorb an enormous amount of energy with his suit (including electrical, thermal, and electromagnetic energy). The suit is able to absorb approximately six to seven billion joules of energy safely, and may absorb more, but if not discharged soon, could be damaging to the suit - it has not been tested. - HUD built into suit mask, capable of managing secured communications lines, tagging specific targets, connecting to satellites, dampening extremely bright light and loud sound, prone to glitches as more stress is put on the HUD (when programmed to map the thermographic readings of the surrounding populated area to find a single target, a flash bang caused Arc to be dazed for a couple seconds due to the mask not being able to dampen the effects properly.) Continued use of the HUD and related systems uses approximately 1.2 kilowatts. - One .454 casull semi-automatic pistol that has been modified to have high muzzle velocity, one Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova sniper's rifle designed for increased effective range out to 1000 meters (max range 1650 meters with scope and laser sight), one M16 assault rifle with grenade launcher attached (unmodified). - One katana made out of folded Thallunite alloy. - His gloves can discharge electricity through them, up to 1,500,000 volts (with tasers in reality sometimes unleashing only 200,000 volts), with a current of 500 amperes. This means that 750 million joules of energy flow through his hands every second (unlike stun-guns and tasers however it does not pulse the electricity to a rhythm that interrupts the nervous system (real life stuff). Essentially, instead of forcing you on the ground and knocking you out and disabling motor functions, the device would char you and cause lots, and lots, of pain.) - Fake headsets that he has given to people to trap them, that electrocute them instead. Non-fatal, enough electricity to knock out a normal human being. - Fragmentation grenades, tear gas, flashbangs, HE grenades. He gets his grenades from a variety of vendors, most recently the Falcone crime family in Gotham. - Grappling hooks. - Sleep darts and a dart gun designed specifically to fire the darts. - Cryo-foam designed to stop a speedster with incredible cold temperatures.... If it makes contact. - All kinds of typical mundane, normal ammunition for his guns (armor piercing, hollow point etc. etc.) - Re-breather for underwater excursions, not built into suit. - Many small disks (ten or so on-hand usually), that can be placed and automatically attach to an object, and can levitate it above the ground. Each disk nullifies gravity for 5 kg of matter. - His current suit automatically filters out most particulate gases. - His current suit can teleport to any location within 500 miles, once per day; if he tries again his suit could overheat internally and kill him. He has not tested whether or not it will actually kill him. Each teleport uses approximately ~1,000,000,000 joules of electricity from his suit, so he cannot perform the action on low power. - A few research labs, a small foundry and refinery within his compound, and access to promethium, thallunite, and most un-restricted elements on the real-life periodic table (such as calcium, magnesium, silicon, lithium, but not, for example, uranium or francium). - A staff of ~250 in his compound; various lab technicians, scientists, some security guards, and engineers, and typical other jobs for a corporate building (such as janitors or secretaries). - Current fortune amount (liquid assets): $13.85 million. Weaknesses/Vulnerabilities - Severe temper. - Arrogance. - Young and somewhat inexperienced compared to others in his field of work. - Severed left hand. - Emotional scarring from teenage years. - Magic. - Psychic abilities. Category:Characters Category:Gotham Category:Villains